“You didn’t mention another item on that list of what you enjoy,” Harper told her. “You love using your ability.”
Drake said gravely, “It is the one acceptable power I have.”
Harper watched the exhilaration fade from Drake’s face. She stared into the depths of the dark eyes, chilled to see again what she had first seen weeks ago: emptiness, a haunted grief.
Drake looked away from her. “Come back to the observation deck,” she said softly.
Moments later, Harper waited in indefinable, trembling expectancy as Drake sat on the sofa beside her.
Drake said, “Last night is between us now. But I want our time together to continue as before. I want you to talk to me as before.”
Frustrated to the verge of tears by the riddle of this woman, Harper whispered, “I can’t.”
Drake sighed. “Flowers accept rain without questioning its source or meaning. Is it so difficult to simply accept what happens between us until our voyage ends?”
Harper said bitterly, “So last night you were the heaven-sent rain falling on me.”
“Not heaven-sent,” Drake replied evenly.
“Last night had no meaning to you?”
“To me it means that there is more between us now.”
Harper said vehemently, “I need something from you. Something.”
“I can give only what I am able to give.”
“What you’re willing to give.”
“For me it is the same.”
Harper closed her eyes and turned away from her.
“Talk to me if you can,” Drake said gently. “For a while. Will you, Harper?”
She thought in despair, I can either continue with her as before or try to stay away from even the sight of her for the next three and a half months. “All right,” she sighed. “What do you want me to talk about tonight?”
“I think ... places where you lived after you left the Trads. The houses, the cities.”
She could not afterward remember what she had been saying when the pale beautiful face neared hers, filling her vision. Only that she had faltered into silence, a brushfire of desire enveloping her.
Then Drake’s lips were caressing her face. But with all her strength she held Drake away; she took the gray shirt in her hands and opened it. “I want to see you.”
Drake allowed her only briefly to gaze at the long sweeping lines of her body, the lean thighs, the delicate black triangle between. Then Drake’s mouth came to hers and Drake took off Harper’s jumpsuit. And Harper’s body was covered by silk of such astonishing softness and warmth that she could scarcely breathe. Could she possibly feel like this to Drake? Could some other woman possibly feel as Drake did to her?
Drake’s unhurried, exploring hands added new dimension to her desire and intensified it. Holding Harper’s face, kissing her, she drew Harper’s tongue into her and circled its tip. Body memory of the night before returned with such force that Harper surged into her, desire flaring into passion. She moaned her want but Drake pressed the softness of her body sinuously into her and her tongue began another slow rhythm that brought other body memory, fresh and paralyzing. Wrapping her arms and legs around Drake, fused to the nirvana of her body, Harper abandoned herself to Drake’s will, to an eroticism that became the very edge of orgasm.
Sometime later Drake moved down between her legs and the edge of orgasm became its measureless fiery heart.
Harper again found herself lifted, carried, lowered.
She clung to Drake. “Stay with me,” she mumbled.
“I cannot.”
“Till I sleep ...”
And then she was asleep.
In the next two weeks Harper’s existence fell into a disjointed pattern. Service Headquarters had demanded extensive debriefing in order to perform their own analysis of the deflection shield failure and activation of Robomech-four; and with point-of-no-return only thirteen days hence, they had placed go-ahead for the voyage on standby.
“Cupidity, duplicity, stupidity ...” Harper muttered the same litany of imprecations every morning as she pulled her unwilling body out of bed to oversee transmission of yet another mass of data on Scorpio IV’s status. Certainly she and Drake would continue this voyage and load their precious cargo of Antares asteroid crystals—and those officious morons at Headquarters knew it. The shield failure had merely given them license to subject her to the bureaucratic minutiae that brightened their tedious, gravity-bound lives.
However unnecessary and monotonous her increased workload might be, she was grateful for its minor distractions. Her unoccupied hours without Drake stretched out blankly, interminably. She consumed her meals with indifference and because she knew she must. She passed the rest of her time meticulously grooming herself, or in dreaming contemplation of the blazing universe beyond the view windows, her mind burning with its own images, her memories of Drake.
With each successive evening, as Drake appeared on the observation deck, she seemed more dramatically beautiful, more dynamic, powerful, magnetizing. With each successive evening Harper succumbed more compliantly to the whims and dictates of Drake’s mind, divulging any detail of her life that would hold Drake’s complete focus—all of it a part of the waiting for the moment when Drake would reach for her, when she would slide the clothing over Harper’s shoulders, when the purest part of the night would begin.
She had tried to give back some measure of her ecstasies one evening before Drake’s hands and mouth once more turned her into flame. “This,” Drake had told her, her eyes smoldering as she again drew Harper to her, “is everything I require.”
In the small part of herself still capable of objective thought, Harper knew desperately that along with her body she was yielding her will, her identity, perhaps even her mind. She had become a voluptuary in thrall to her nightly consummations in Drake’s arms, thinking of no past beyond the bliss of the night before, of no future beyond the night ahead. It was small comfort that each night Drake’s own passion did not cease until Harper lay in insensate repletion. She was Drake’s sexual pawn.
On that earlier voyage to Orion she had been subtly but profoundly affected by the alien vastness of space. Could this be a different manifestation of that same neurosis? After entry into the Antares asteroid belt, when Drake was fully involved with the problems of bringing back to life a disabled Scorpio IV— perhaps then she could establish some sort of grip on her saner self ...
As Scorpio IV approached within a light year of the Antares asteroid belt, Service Headquarters signaled its go-ahead just as Harper had known it would. Rendezvous would occur at twenty-hundred hours.
Harper pulled on the close-fitting white coverall she would wear in zero gravity, apparel designed to adhere to any surface of the ship and prevent her from floating as helplessly as a dust mote. Like all Space Service recruits, she had undergone extensive periods of sensory deprivation, and her deep space training had also included weightlessness, a curious and amusing oddity when experienced short-term, but which had produced severe physical and psychological trauma in space-age pioneers during the first interplanetary voyages.
She moved awkwardly toward the command cabin, irrationally annoyed by the pull on the soles of her feet, the slowness of her progress. She was well aware of the source of her ill-temper: there would be no lovemaking this night—and subsequent nights as well; Drake would be fully occupied with the navigational challenges of her spacecraft.
Drake was seated in her command chair, eyes fixed on the narrow navigation windows that revealed the Antares asteroid belt, a glowing necklace illuminated by its far distant but spectacularly fiery mother star. Like Harper, Drake also wore a coverall, hers black.
“Only minutes remain for any additional transmissions,” Drake stated without looking at her.
“Right,” Harper acknowledged, forgiving the officious tone; Drake was immersed in computations for final approach. Before the forces in the asteroid belt could play havoc with the spacecraft’s guid
ance systems, Drake would fully shut down its power and make use of the remaining forward thrust to drift them into a thick, crystal-rich segment of the belt. All was in readiness for the period when she and Drake would be in partial sensory deprivation and dependent on the ship’s accumulated oxygen, when Scorpio IV would be the equivalent of a dead, drifting shell.
Having earlier completed her transmissions, including one to Niklaus, Harper now sat in quiet excitement that contained a thrill of fear. On the screens she watched each storage hatch slowly flex open in preparation for receiving the asteroid crystals; she watched through the navigation windows the unfolding drama of their approach.
Drake’s calm voice penetrated the quiet: “Ten seconds to full shut down.” She pulled a light mesh body restraint across herself, as did Harper.
Even though she knew, had been fully trained to expect it, Harper was stunned by the bright cabin’s plunge into blackness. Then the utter silence—the silence, she thought, of the grave. Her straining eyes slowly adjusted; finally the orange-red, fluorescin-imbued room emerged into dim, eerie visibility. Drake’s body in its black coverall was part of the darkness, but her face was a pale oval in the ghostly white light cast by Antares. The silence quickly became an aching in Harper’s ears and she sucked in her breath to hear its sound.
A sigh of satisfaction came from Drake. “Not a trace of yaw.”
“I’m glad,” Harper said fervently, recoiling from the thought of Scorpio IV pitching continuously from side to side throughout all the hours of free fall.
“You should be,” Drake said drily. “You’d be throwing up by now.”
I suppose you wouldn’t, Harper thought, more amused than annoyed by Drake’s arrogance. Her white-sleeved arm was floating in front of her; she steered it to the console and smiled as she tried to make her fingernails drum; the hand kept floating upward. Her pre-eminent physical sensation was the adhesive clothing and restraint mesh holding her body into her chair.
She stared out the navigation windows as Scorpio IV closed swiftly on the glowing asteroid belt. Their blind, silent spacecraft could as well be one of those aerodynamic paper airplanes she had constructed as a child and cast into the air currents. She continued to watch in speechless awe as the mysterious asteroid belt slowly gathered her and Drake into its radiance and swallowed them whole, as they became part of a thickening world of swirling blue-white crystal, brilliantly glittering jewels colliding soundlessly, harmlessly, against the surfaces of the ship.
“Drake ...” Harper breathed.
“Yes. It is truly beautiful.”
Drake’s voice came from above her; she had risen to stand beside Harper in the spectral darkness. Drake’s face seemed to float beside her as she leaned down to unfasten Harper’s restraint. “For now nothing can be done for my ship. Come to me,” she said softly, and took Harper’s hands.
Her mouth dry, Harper allowed herself to be pulled out of her chair and into Drake’s arms, against the substantiality of her body. “Some of our senses need not be deprived,” Drake murmured, and her mouth came to Harper’s.
She became ever weaker in Drake’s arms, immobilized by the swift thrusts of Drake’s tongue. Drake opened Harper’s coverall, began to slide it from her. Staring into the austere, ethereally beautiful face so close to hers, her pulse pounding in her ears, Harper yielded to what she knew would be ultimate helplessness.
Naked, held to Drake only by a clasped hand, floating like an air bubble, she watched her white clothing drift away somewhere into the black.
Drake pulled Harper to her, clasped Harper’s body to hers. Drake had not removed her coverall but had opened it to expose her body; and Harper felt only the exquisite surface contact of Drake’s silken skin, felt her breasts only as they touched the warm softness of Drake, as they were caressingly held in Drake’s hand; she felt her lips only as Drake savored them, felt her mouth only from Drake’s tongue inside her. As Drake’s fingers slid slowly, tantalizingly over her thighs and then between her legs, she felt her wetness on Drake’s fingers, felt her weightless body swell in a ripening of desire that became a strange, new, keenly throbbing ache.
Murmuring thickly, indecipherably, Drake moved Harper’s body away from her so that it again floated free. She captured Harper’s hips, raised Harper to her mouth.
All feeling in her entire body was focused between her legs, fused to the slow tongue strokes, each a lightning strike of sensation. In the red-etched, black command cabin she writhed uncontrollably, helpless as a windblown flame.
“Please,” she gasped, “oh, please ...”
But the strokes only gradually quickened. Anchored to Drake’s merciless mouth, her gyrating body rose above Drake’s head and then fell back down, then rotated from side to side. She felt the wetness pour from her as Drake’s mouth became more avid. She approached a brilliance of orgasm as if she would fall into a star. And then the brilliance consumed her.
Harper was drawn down, into Drake’s arms. “So beautifully wonderfully wet ...” Drake’s voice was an intoxicated whisper.
Soon afterward Drake held her against a wall, Harper’s feet floating off the floor. “The human body is a miracle,” Drake murmured, her warm face buried in Harper’s breasts. “In new circumstances its nerve paths simply seek new connections ...” Sometime later she floated Harper free from the wall, and again lifted her. Her tongue inside the writhing, moaning Harper, Drake moaned her own joy.
Harper awakened disoriented, then quickly realized that she was still in the command cabin. Drake, she remembered, had placed her naked in a chair, lowering the chair’s back. Her clothing was beside her, the restraint mesh around her. She could not see that Drake was gone, but knew infallibly that she was, that she would be in her own quarters.
She donned her coverall, made her awkward, painstaking way through the eerie fluorescence to her quarters, to the galley; then she returned to the command cabin and the chair where Drake had left her.
Cloaked by the darkness, soothed by it, she removed her coverall and again fastened herself down with the restraint mesh. She stretched sensuously. So this was sensory deprivation. If the Space Service bureaucrats could see her now ...
With no sense of time passing she gazed contentedly, languorously at the jewel-laden world swirling beyond the windows, its treasures drifting unawares into the ship’s storage containers. She wondered if she could have dreamed her memories, those impossible sensations of the night before.
Drake spoke her name from across the room. “How very lovely you look,” she added, amusement in her soft tones.
How can she possibly see me from where she is, Harper wondered, straining to make out any image of her. And then the thought passed from her as Drake reached her, bent down to unfasten the restraint. Harper floated up and into her arms.
Drake murmured, “We have only a few more hours ... Then I must take care of my ship ...”
Harper learned that she had not dreamed any of the sensations of the night before.
Working from the lowest possible power generation, her hands translucent over the faintly illuminated, blinking console, Drake slowly built up data and set data locks, correlating larger and larger segments into the exponentially expanding design that would bring Scorpio IV back to life. Harper, sitting beside her in bemused incomprehension, responded to an occasional tersely worded order and performed the equivalent of handing an implement to an architect.
As the hours passed, as Drake became more immersed in the complexities of her work, her orders ceased. Harper dozed fitfully in her chair, then slept.
The leaden weight of her body and the painfully bright command cabin lights awakened her. Feeling pressed into her chair, she squeezed her watering eyes shut. When she was able to focus, the chronometer told her it was mid-morning. Beside her Drake continued to work, seemingly unaffected by the renewed gravity and light, but her face was drawn, etched in concentration and exhaustion.
Harper asked in concern, “Is there something I
can—”
“Yes. Either I calibrate the major systems at one sitting or I must begin all over again. Leave the bridge immediately. Do not return unless I signal for your assistance.”
Smarting with anger and humiliation, Harper made her way to her quarters. She donned normal clothing, then wrathfully stalked up to the observation deck. She watched, standing with her arms crossed, the swarming crystals. Her eyes burning from the endlessly varied bright patterns, her injured feelings unsoothed, she sat down on Drake’s chaise and distracted herself with Jane Eyre from the ship’s library.
It was late in the afternoon when a slight vibration under her feet became a hum and gathered strength; the ship’s stardrive was beginning its rise to full capacity. Unwillingly, and only as a matter of what she perceived to be her military duty, she marched down the ramp and looked in unobserved on Drake. She gaped in astonishment.
Drake was slumped over her console, her feebly moving hands clawlike, her face deathly pale. Gone were all traces of her magnetism, her power, her overwhelming beauty. She looked gaunt and debilitated, as if she had aged decades.
Harper blurted her shock. “Drake—”
“Leave me.” The words were hissed and vehement. “Our lives depend on it.”
Harper climbed numbly up to the observation deck. Astonished and terrified, chilled to her marrow with the realization that she might actually have to fulfill her ultimate mission on this voyage, she scanned the status monitors.
All systems were approaching readiness, she saw with relief. Communications were still down, but contact with Headquarters was not essential if it fell on her shoulders to bring Scorpio IV out of the asteroid belt and to safety. After she cleared the danger zone she could simply trigger a signal that would pinpoint their position and effect rescue of herself and Drake.
She comforted herself with the likelihood that Drake’s illness, serious as it appeared, was acute exhaustion curable by sheer release from the massive outpouring of physical and psychic energy necessary to achieve the resurrection of Scorpio IV. Since Drake’s diurnal habits and patterns indicated her need for a lengthier restorative period than for most individuals, she had perhaps been doubly affected by this violation of her bodily needs.
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